Il realismo nella pittura europea del XIX secolo

by Linda Nochlin

Il tema di questo libro di Linda Nochlin, pubblicato per la prima volta da Einaudi nel 1979, è che significato abbia una pittura che si affida all'evidenza figurativa più esplicita e più legata alle realtà sociali e ideologiche. Courbet, Manet, Degas e Monet, e poi i pre-Raffaelliti, costituiscono i punti salienti di un'analisi che interessa l'America e l'Europa (in particolare l'Italia, la Germania, la Francia e l'Inghilterra), e che non manca di studiare alcune tematiche specifiche, come la donna perduta come anti-eroina, la morte, il senso fisico di percezione di cose e oggetti, il lavoro, la vita familiare nella sua intimità, l'eroismo della vita moderna.

Genres: Art, Art History, Nonfiction, History, Essays, France, Art and Photography

Paperback

First published March 30, 1971

About the author

Linda Nochlin was an American art historian, university professor and writer. A prominent feminist art historian, she was best known as a proponent of the question "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?", in an essay of the same name published in 1971.

Her critical attention has been drawn to investigating the ways in which gender affects the creation and apprehension of art, as evidenced by her 1994 essay "Issues of Gender in Cassatt and Eakins". Besides feminist art history, she was best known for her work on Realism, specifically on Gustave Courbet. Complementing her career as an academic, she served on the Art Advisory Council of the International Foundation for Art Research. In 2006, Nochlin received a Visionary Woman Award] from Moore College of Art & Design.

Reviews

[AC · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fine contribution to an excellent series, Penguin’s Stle and Civilization, Nochlin’s writing is often pretentious and way over-cooked, but also contains brilliant nuggets scattered throughout. A bit frustrating, actually.

[Riri · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[franticrolls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Linda Nochlin ha un modo di scrivere estremamente contemporaneo che ha reso questo libro ancora più scorrevole di quanto già non fosse per i temi trattati a cui ero molto interessata. Si tratta di un approfondimento sul realismo, ma che verso la fine si sposta anche a movimenti di avanguardia e della cultura pop che sono stati inevitabilmente influenzati dal lavoro di Courbet. Sicuramente è molto utile se si vuole approfondire le meccaniche che stanno dietro ad un movimento artistico e nello specifico dietro a quello del realismo. Lo consiglio a tutti gli appassionati d’arte.
Quattro stelle e non cinque perché, facendo parte Linda Nochlin del movimento femminista, avrei preferito che il capitolo sulla figura della donna durasse di più.

[Caterina Pierre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent of course. The one-star deduction is for the very dry Epilogue that was published without images. No real footnotes; must have been a publisher's decision years ago that would not fly today in a scholarly book. However if you want to write about the style it's a must-read, and it hasn't really been replaced or surpassed.

[Max Vanderleeden · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

[Rivse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some may find Nochlin’s double cream prose, with its refinements embedded inside refinements and spiraling subordinate clauses, self-indulgent and difficult to follow, but this is a comprehensive account of the Realist movement in the arts by an author with an effortless command of French artistic and literary culture of the period and an irrepressible jouissance about her subject that sweeps the reader along. Though scaled to the dimensions of a period survey, her discussions of plein air painting and the Realist artist’s preoccupation with contemporaneity are authentic critical engagements with her subject that offer deeper insights than are customary in the genre. The epilogue is rushed and perfunctory, as another reader has noted, but it usefully traces Realism’s demise as a movement and its links to the movements that followed, such as Symbolism and Modernism. The feminist consciousness that informs Nochlin’s later work is mostly absent here, surfacing only in her treatment of Realist painters' depictions of "the fallen woman" at the book's conclusion. That is one drawback. Another is that the black and white illustrations in the Penguin addition are too small to provide the reader with more than a vague comprehension of the paintings under discussion.

[Joseph Adelizzi, Jr. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Linda Nochlin is intelligent. She probably knows more about Art than 99.9999999% of those on the planet, and she certainly knows more about Art than I ever will. She shared so many insights, brought out so many facets of the many works she described in her book Realism that I was amazed and bored. My bad, I admit, but for me Art is feeling and I found her descriptions and interpretations so scholarly, so cold, and so limp as to be devoid of feeling.

I know they say “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but Nochlin seems to have taken that cliche literally, crowing on with at least a thousand antiseptic words assembled in lengthy paragraphs, murdering all feeling the artists strove so hard to embrace as she proceeded with her dissections. There was an audible “SNAP!” as I finished reading her description of Degas’ grand-daughterly delicate “The Dancer” which was either my head hitting the desk or Nochlin removing her rubber gloves after she finished her autopsy. Or both.

Another cliche comes to mind right now: “Once more - with feeling.”

Sorry.